Richard Socarides: Coming Out to Dad

Richard Socarides served as President Clinton’s senior adviser on gay rights (and is an Out100 honoree), and in this video he explains his coming out experience to his dad, a prominent psychiatrist who viewed homosexuality as a mental illness and who spent much of his life attempting to “cure” gay people.

In the great video interview Socarides—who points out "my story is no harder nor easier than anybody else’s. It’s just my story. It is a little stranger than most"—describes how in his twenties he made the difficult decision of coming out to his father. As he explains:

[My father] was the founder, or one of the founders, of the school of psychiatry that believed homosexuality was a mental illness and that it could be cured through psychotherapy. … [H]is idea was they should be treated like any other neurotic. Couple of trips to a therapist and it should be just fine.